Bitcoin made big news within the last several weeks, as El Salvador became the first nation to pass a law allowing the electronic currency to be accepted as legal tender within that country.

It became bigger news a little over a week later, when the World Bank declined to support El Salvador's use of the cryptocurrency.

All these actions raise some basic questions. Namely, what is Bitcoin and how exactly does it work? For the answer to those questions, we turned to Grant Sanderson's 26-minute 3Blue1Brown video to find out:

Meanwhile, if you want a real flash from the past, here's the first analysis we saw from an economist on the topic of bitcoin. Here's an excerpt from their recent e-mail on the topic of Bitcoin's adoption by El Salvador.